Staffers complained to Semafor that the CBS News chief keeps pressing them to dig into the Michigan Senate candidate’s alleged Muslim Brotherhood links. Isaac Schorr says the record goes well beyond one tweet and that the complaints expose the newsroom’s own bias.
CBS News staffers are unhappy that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss wants them to look harder at Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan. In a New York Post opinion column, Isaac Schorr argues that Weiss is doing exactly what an editor should.
The internal friction became public on Sunday, when Semafor media reporter Max Tani wrote that Weiss had "personally advocated" for CBS journalists to pursue several story angles about El-Sayed’s alleged sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. Tani suggested control of the Senate "could come down to how much the news media chooses to focus" on a years-old tweet from El-Sayed’s younger half-sister. One anonymous staffer told him Weiss "seems more suited to editing at publications like City Journal, The Free Press or The [Washington] Free Beacon."
More than a tweet
Schorr says reducing the story to one tweet either misleads readers or shows ignorance of the record. He points to a 2012 letter, signed by El-Sayed, that backed Mohamed Morsi, then Egypt’s Brotherhood-aligned president, after Morsi granted himself sweeping new powers. Egyptian pro-democracy activists called the move a coup and "absolute presidential tyranny." The letter read: "We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible."
Schorr also notes that El-Sayed had earlier described the Brotherhood as a reform movement and predicted it would not produce a strongman.
The denial
In a recent NBC interview with Kristen Welker, El-Sayed denied that he or anyone in his family has ties to the Brotherhood, and complained that it was "even a subject of debate." Schorr calls that denial false. He notes that NBC’s Tom Llamas later confronted El-Sayed with a long series of posts from his half-sister, which referred to their mother’s "activism in the Muslim Brotherhood" and said the family had "long been MB."
He also cites Washington Free Beacon reporting that El-Sayed’s father-in-law sat on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America. That group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case and was identified by federal prosecutors as a US branch of the Brotherhood.
A double standard
Schorr argues that the backlash reveals how mainstream newsrooms work: aggressive digging into Republicans, protection for Democrats. He cites the criticism CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford received for praising a voter who asked El-Sayed at a town hall to disavow the Brotherhood. Treating both parties’ candidates with equal scrutiny, he writes, has come to be seen inside such newsrooms as hackery.
He closes with Charles Mackay’s poem "No Enemies," a favorite of Margaret Thatcher, and says Weiss should be proud of every critic her approach has earned her.
This piece summarizes an opinion column by Isaac Schorr published in the New York Post. The views described are the author’s, not this newsroom’s. El-Sayed has denied any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. The photographs are stock file images.
